here, there, everywhere

The awesome students of my (all-women!) Pre-Intermediate III class, which ended two weeks ago. On their first day, I was midway through my standard 1st day of class intro spiel + getting-to-know-you activities when one of them (I forget who) interrupted to ask who I was, and I had to explain that I was actually the teacher, and not just a particularly motivated fellow student.)

I am sorry, as ever, for the radio silence this last month; the excuse this time is that I'm well into my second month of homelessness, thanks to some plans falling through. My battery is dying on my laptop (typing, fast, in Iain's kitchen, where I've been living these last couple of weeks. The whole house, not the kitchen) so in lieu of my own apologetic incoherence, you can read about me on my friend Ben's blog, which you should look at anyway since he actually writes about living in Hanoi and all that, instead of just sporadically resurfacing to apologize for not resurfacing sooner. If you skim around enough, there's a photo of my many exhuast pipe burns as well (I'm on my 4th!)

A few photos from the Marble Mountains, which I wrote more extensively about back in March); the mountain was one of my favorite places in all of Vietnam, so I was really happy we got the chance to go back there. It was sunny this time, so there were crazy beams of light in the caves, and I got to climb through the slippery rockface hole of certain death again, only this time in flipflops.

Crazy spotlights in the cave illuminating the shrines; Josh does... something.

Because I am fancy, I finally figured out how to schedule posts on this thing, which means that as you read this, I am being run over by motorbikes in Saigon, or, at the very least, am sleeping (but in Saigon! Not Hanoi!).

SIDECAR!

Last week I was lucky enough to have my friend Josh from Oberlin visit me on his way back home from Japan; we spent a few days in Hanoi before making a whirlwind trip down to Hoi An, I had a great time and it was awesome getting to see someone from home, though today I am weirdly homesick and missing the Bay Area in particular, which may explain the sudden rush of blog posts (that and I'm not working this week, which means I'm approaching a state of being well-rested for the first time in months). At any rate, I love getting the chance to show someone around Hanoi and drive them around on my motorbike, even if we didn't really manage to do anything particularly touristy while in town.

We did, however, manage to get Josh set up with a lifetime supply of stickers.

At any rate, Josh is gone and everyone else is working, so I am weirdly aimless today; I learned how to fumblingly talk about the weather in Vietnamese today (hot; rainy; spring-rainy; really rainy), and also that apparently me and my teacher's definitions of "mind-crushingly hot" apparently do not coincide. My Vietnamese, by the way, barely deserves to be called that - I'm not good at languages on a good day (see: posts way back in November about my wasted four years of Spanish) and Vietnamese, with its various and sundry new vowel sounds and six tones, is entirely different from anything else I've ever tried to wrap my brain around. I'm trying to practice more these days, though mostly on little kids (if they laugh at me, at least I'm still bigger than them); the best response so far was telling a little girl in Hoi An that her shoes were beautiful (dep qua!) and randomly receiving a giant hug, though whether this was in response to my crazy impressive Vietnamese skills or because she felt that bad for me that I could be so old and still barely able to speak still isn't entirely clear.

Left to right: Thao, who was the most prone to excessive compliments ("I love these new crayons! You are very nice today! This game is awesome!"); Yen Nhi, who was a bit shy at first but who would wait outside the staff room for me to walk to class; and Lan, who had somewhere picked up the phrase "oh noooo" and used it to call attention to pretty much anything that happened ever (a broken crayon: "Oh noooo, Mikka!"; a randomly open window: "oh nooooo!")

Back in June, I got assigned a kids class - Starters Two, which means very, very, very beginner - which was terrifying, given that a month of intensive CELTA training left me overwhelmed at teaching adults with a functional grasp of English already. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I walked into the room on the first day with a box of crayons and a lesson plan that pretty much consisted of:

1) Say "Hello!!! How are you?"

2) Get them to say "Hello!!! How are you?" back.

3) Sing the "Hello!!! How are you?" song at least three times.

4) Pass out crayons.

Left to right: Lan Anh, who was the best artist in the class; Giang and Huy, who blazed through every worksheet I gave them to the point where I had to print out special word-searches for them to do while everyone else finished.

I was in no way prepared for how insanely good natured my students would be about the fact that I clearly had no idea what I was doing (or the fact that they already knew the phrase "Hello, how are you?" - I didn't find out till much later that the first three weeks of our class was meant to be review), but amazingly they were all cool with the fact that we spent the first few weeks doing way too much coloring and BINGO (they rocked BINGO), and after a few weeks, a handful of them took to waiting in the hallway for me to come out of the teachers room, and would bob around me as we walked up the hallway (Them: Hellomikkahowareyou?? Me: I'm fine, thank you, and you? Them: I'mfinethanksandyou?? all the way up the hall) and then whenever I walked into the room they'd all chorus HELLO MIKKA! at the top of their lungs like I was actually a decent teacher who did more than just make them play Simon Says too much. It wasn't till late July that I was finally starting to feel a bit more adventerous, teaching-wise - one day we sang Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles, and seriously if you haven't seen a roomfull of ridiculously tiny Vietnamese children earnestly singing the Beatles, you're missing out.

So I was completely smitten with my kids class by mid-August, which is why I was devastated to walk in one afternoon and find out that I'd been moved to Sundays, which meant my kids were going to be given a new teacher, and even more gutted when I found out the shift was happening that weekend and that I would never get to teach them again. I fell all over myself describing them to their new teacher ("They love coloring and BINGO and Simon Says and this game where you paste pictures to their backs and make them guess, oh, and wordsearches, don't forget those, Giang and Huy will finish everything really fast and Linh and Nghia need extra time, and Thuong will ask you to look at everything she does, and if you give Thao the new crayon box she will love you forever and, we started making zoo collages last week, don't forget their zoo collages, and and and" ) and I still miss them, like a lot, so much that I'm writing ridiculously long posts about them instead of my recent trip to Hoi An or pretty much anything else about living in Hanoi, but there you go. I miss you guys.

Mountain cow.

A few more photos of the drive up to Mai Chau; I had never driven my motorbike outside of Hanoi, and it was the most fun I've ever had, on mostly empty roads through the mountains and rice paddies, I can't wait to do it again sometime.

Leaving Hanoi












Storm clouds over Hoa Bihn on the drive home. Amazingly, the rain wasn't that intense.

Kids on the side of the road who started waving like crazy when we stopped to take photos of the sunset.

I am, as ever, sitting at Puku Cafe abusing the free wifi and running late for work, so more photos of my awesome (if too short) motorbike trip from two weekends ago to come (I know I always say that, but no, really, it's too beautiful there not to show off a bit). I've been busier with work lately - I'll be up to six classes this week and starting work on Saturdays soon - but things here are going really great, as always - so great that I'm most likely signing another contract to stay here through February '09, as it happens, which will round out what was meant to be a 3-month stay into a full year and which means all of you have that many extra months to come visit (hint, hint).

Tuan, Ha and Thahn and the catch of the day (the minnow in the beer glass).

Nhat: See this fish? He's somewhere between life and death.
Me: I think he wants to go home. Can't we let him go?
Ha: No, I want to eat him.
Thahn: (drops leftovers from lunch into beer stein).

If the hotpot looks familiar to anyone back home, it's because apparently it's "American Chicken," according to all of my students.

Hanoi in July is oppressively hot and humid, prone to amazing lightening storms that go on for hours and pyrotechnically bright sunsets that have the power to make even my jaded teenage class stop talking and stare out the window. I've been too busy with work to do anything much these last few weeks, though Lenora came to visit two weeks ago (!) and she very patiently put up with my run of strangely bad luck (falling down the stairs while carrying my computer, two exhaust pipe burns in a span of 2 days, about $450 being stolen from my U.S. bank account, various and sundry apartment woes) and she even used the phrase "not wanting to die anymore" to talk about being on the back of my motorbike, which means I totally did not traumatize her with my driving at ALL. At any rate, Lenora pictures to follow hopefully, and more about teaching, but I'm late for work now so, lots of love, and I miss everyone back home as always.